Blood Ties:
Writing Across Chinese Borders

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editors Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.

Blood Ties presents work from rural and urban China, Tibet, Singapore, and the U.S. Through fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and artwork, this volume explores the complexities of Chinese identity created by migration, displacement, ethnic mixing, and separation from home. Individuals whose identities have been made more complex by rapid globalization will find these works especially meaningful.

Authors include Alai, Zhang Kangkang, Zhu Wenying, Zhang Er, Wang Ping, Arthur Sze, Yan Li, Catherine Lim, Colin Cheong, Rex Shelley, and Yi writer Aku Wuwu, published in English for the first time. Subjects range from the preservation of ethnic-minority cultures to the transformation of women’s roles by industrialization and urbanization.

The volume also presents Konglish, a chapbook of poems by Yuzun Kang, the winner of the first Vincent Chin Memorial Chapbook Prize; a flash portrait of Hong Kong by Ken Chen; a moving essay by Gregory Yee Mark on the Chinese immigrant experience in Hawai‘i; and more.

Guest editors: Karen Gernant has published her translations in four issues of MĀNOA as well as the publications Conjunctions, turnrow, and Black Warrior Review. Chen Zeping is a professor in the Chinese department at Fujian Teachers’ University; he has published a number of works on Chinese linguistics. Translators include Karen Gernant, Chen Zeping, Denis Mair, Bill Ransom, Mark Bender, and Jjiepa Ayi.

Interior artist: On Char was born in 1889 to immigrant plantation workers in Kohala, a town on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. From 1911 until his retirement in 1954, he operated the City Photo Studio in Honolulu, except for a two-year period during which he trained in New York and Chicago. When he retired, he donated his life’s work of over 90,000 negatives to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu; many of these document the Chinese immigrant experience.

208 pp., summer 2005 (17:1), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2954-9
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JSTOR